“Terrorism” and “Gun Control”

Posted On 15 Jun 2016 / 0 Comment

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The bodies of the 49 innocent individuals shot and killed by Omar Mateen in the wee hour of June 12 hadn’t even gotten cold before the rhetoric began flying. The New York-born Floridian of Afghan-Pakistani origin brought three highly controversial topics to the surface with his act of senseless carnage: gun violence/gun control, terrorism/anti-Muslim sentiment, and anti-gay hatred…

..This complicated scenario was only getting more complicated as I compiled information for this column. The earliest speculation painted Mateem’s rampage at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, as a Muslim extremist’s violent over-reaction to witnessing two gays kissing each other while he was in Miami with his kid. Later reports suggested that Mateem himself had spent a lot of time at Pulse, had several “gay dating” applications on his smartphone, and may have been a “conflcted” gay man himself. If true, this story would crush the narrative that the shooter was yet another “self-radicalized” Muslim at war with America. I’ll come back to the Muslim angle in a bit…

…The tragedy in Orlando was called the single biggest act of gun violence in modern U.S. history. (It has been appropriately pointed out that earlier massacres of Native Americans and blacks had higher “body counts.”) Much of the rhetoric that flew immediately after the Orlando murders was either “anti-gun” or “pro-second amendment.” While Mateem was originally identified as using an AR-15 “assault rifle” and a Glock pistol, the shooter was actually armed with a Ruger MCX semiautomatic “AR-15 style” rifle with a 30-round magazine and a Glock 17 semi pistol with a 17-round mag. The Glock 17 is one of the weapons most commonly used by law enforcement…

…I’m not anti-gun, by any stretch of the imagination. But the firearm-fondling gun nuts would have us believe that “assault rifles” get a bad rap. After all, they’re “only” semiautomatics, not full-auto machine guns. Here’s the problem with that logic. It’s not the shape of the weapons, their cool stocks or their typically ominous black silhouettes that make them the guns of choice for military special operators and mass murderers. It’s their high-capacity magazines. Mags can be replaced in a second or two. Special ops guys seldom turn their weapons on full automatic. They prefer to save ammunition and increase accuracy by staying on semi and firing in two- or three-round bursts… just like Mateem was able to do at Pulse. Semiautomatic rifles are available in considerably higher calibers than the typical .223 used in most assault rifles, but they don’t have 30-round, quick-change mags…

…Mateen, a US citizen. legally purchased a weapon with a high-capacity magazine designed to kill as many humans as possible as efficiently as possible. Easy access to such mass-casualty weaponry is the problem. There is no reason for the average American to own a high-capacity magazine. Since the “Assault Weapon Ban” expired in 2004, such rifles and magazines are legal to buy, sell and use in the U.S. We need to re-examine at least the high-capacity magazine portion of that expired legislation…

…The rush to judgment in naming the Orlando shooter as a Muslim terrorist was unsurprisingly simplistic. (As I mentioned, evidence is still being gathered on that… but it seems that Mateen had a prior history at Pulse and might have had highly non-religious reasons for his attack.) If a shooter has an Arab-sounding name, the default motive becomes “terrorism.” We are a country with Muslim cops, soldiers and doctors. We are a country that will never put a dent in actual global terrorism without intelligence and support from our allies in Muslim countries. Declaring war against a religion is both un-American and tragically ineffective…

…If there has been an unexpected “up” side to all of this, it has been the overwhelming support shown to the victims of the shooter and their families, friends and loved ones. Yes, there have been small pockets of anti-gay commentary in the wake of the tragedy in Orlando, but they have been few and far between. Haters gotta hate, as the kids say today. The scorn shown to those who used the mass shooting at Pulse to justify or advocate an anti-homosexual agenda has been refreshing…

…There are still a lot of questions to be answered on all this, as you might expect. Lawmakers and others are already looking at ways to prevent future mass murders. It’s time to revisit a ban on high-capacity magazines. To paraphrase… doing the same thing (nothing) and expecting different results is crazy…